Black Panther #1 by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Why I chose it: We are in the midst of a huge book purge because it costs an absurd amount of money to ship books overseas, and this one from my partner’s pile caught my eye.

Review: I think this is a situation where I needed to have more background to fully understand what was going on. I felt like I was dropped into the middle of a story that everyone else already knew. Like, starting on book three of Harry Potter without having read the first two. It’d be confusing, right? That’s how this felt, although this is the first book.

Despite having trouble understanding exactly what was going on, I still enjoyed reading it. There were interesting characters, and the story’s ending definitely made me interested enough to seek out book two when I have the chance.

This is also the 104th book I’ve read this year. I kind of can’t believe it. I’m going to do a wrap-up post about my reading over on my own website (askmusings.com) sometime in the next couple of days if you want to check that out. It was fun to set such a big goal and reach it primarily with non-fiction books (although I did have a few novels and graphic novels in there as well). I think I only did maybe one audio book this year too. Which isn’t to say that reading 104 audio books would have been any less of an achievement; it just wasn’t my focus this year.

However, I did notice that setting such a high goal meant that some longer, more involved books went unread. There’s a 500+ page book on the problems of policing that I want to dive into, for example, but every time I looked at it, I thought about my reading goal. And that’s probably not how this all should go down. So next year, it’s back to the regular 52-book cannonball read for me.